Patient safety in pre-hospital emergency tracheal intubation: a comprehensive meta-analysis of the intubation success rates of EMS providers

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Pre-hospital airway management is a controversial subject, but there is general agreement that a small number of seriously ill or injured patients require urgent emergency tracheal intubation (ETI) and ventilation. Many European emergency medical services (EMS) systems provide physicians to care for these patients while other systems rely on paramedics (or, rarely, nurses). The ETI success rate is an important measure of provider and EMS system success and a marker of patient safety. Methods We conducted a systematic search of Medline and EMBASE to identify all of the published original English-language articles reporting pre-hospital ETI in adult patients. We selected all of the studies that reported ETI success rates and extracted information on the number of attempted and successful ETIs, type of provider, level of ETI training and the availability of drugs on scene. We calculated the overall success rate using meta-analysis and assessed the relationships between the ETI success rate and type of provider and between the ETI success rate and the types of drugs available on the scene. Results From 1,070 studies initially retrieved, we identified 58 original studies meeting the selection criteria. Sixty-four per cent of the non-physician-manned services and 54% of the physician-manned services reported ETI success rates but the success rate reporting was incomplete in three studies from non-physician-manned services. Median success rate was 0.905 (0.491, 1.000). In a weighted linear regression analysis, physicians as providers were significantly associated with increased success rates, 0.092 ( P = 0.0345). In the non-physician group, the use of drug-assisted intubation significantly increased the success rates. All physicians had access to traditional rapid sequence induction (RSI) and, comparing these to non-physicians using muscle paralytics or a traditional RSI, there still was a significant difference in success rate in favour of physicians, 0.991 and 0.955, respectively ( P = 0.047). Conclusions This comprehensive meta-analysis suggests that physicians have significantly fewer pre-hospital ETI failures overall than non-physicians. This finding, which remains true when the non-physicians administer muscle paralytics or RSI, raises significant patient safety issues. In the absence of pre-hospital physicians, conducting basic or advanced airway techniques other than ETI should be strongly considered.

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• Published by: biomed
• Published: 01 January 2012
• Reads: 19
• Language: English

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Lossiuset al.Critical Care2012,16:R24 http://ccforum.com/content/16/1/R24

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Open Access

Patient safety in prehospital emergency tracheal intubation: a comprehensive metaanalysis of the intubation success rates of EMS providers 1,2* 1,3 4,5 Hans Morten Lossius , Jo Røislien and David J Lockey

Abstract Introduction:Prehospital airway management is a controversial subject, but there is general agreement that a small number of seriously ill or injured patients require urgent emergency tracheal intubation (ETI) and ventilation. Many European emergency medical services (EMS) systems provide physicians to care for these patients while other systems rely on paramedics (or, rarely, nurses). The ETI success rate is an important measure of provider and EMS system success and a marker of patient safety. Methods:We conducted a systematic search of Medline and EMBASE to identify all of the published original Englishlanguage articles reporting prehospital ETI in adult patients. We selected all of the studies that reported ETI success rates and extracted information on the number of attempted and successful ETIs, type of provider, level of ETI training and the availability of drugs on scene. We calculated the overall success rate using metaanalysis and assessed the relationships between the ETI success rate and type of provider and between the ETI success rate and the types of drugs available on the scene. Results:From 1,070 studies initially retrieved, we identified 58 original studies meeting the selection criteria. Sixty four per cent of the nonphysicianmanned services and 54% of the physicianmanned services reported ETI success rates but the success rate reporting was incomplete in three studies from nonphysicianmanned services. Median success rate was 0.905 (0.491, 1.000). In a weighted linear regression analysis, physicians as providers were significantly associated with increased success rates, 0.092 (P= 0.0345). In the nonphysician group, the use of drugassisted intubation significantly increased the success rates. All physicians had access to traditional rapid sequence induction (RSI) and, comparing these to nonphysicians using muscle paralytics or a traditional RSI, there still was a significant difference in success rate in favour of physicians, 0.991 and 0.955, respectively (P= 0.047). Conclusions:This comprehensive metaanalysis suggests that physicians have significantly fewer prehospital ETI failures overall than nonphysicians. This finding, which remains true when the nonphysicians administer muscle paralytics or RSI, raises significant patient safety issues. In the absence of prehospital physicians, conducting basic or advanced airway techniques other than ETI should be strongly considered.

Introduction Airway compromise has been identified as a preventable cause of poor outcomes and death in trauma and cardiac arrest patients for many years [1,2]. After arriving in a hos pital, the critical and complex intervention of emergency tracheal intubation (ETI) is usually provided by appropri ately trained physicians. Most of these physicians are

* Correspondence: [e-mail] 1 Department of Research and Development, The Norwegian Air Ambulance Foundation, Holterveien 24, PO Box 94, N1441 Drøbak, Norway Full list of author information is available at the end of the article

trained anaesthesiologists or emergency physicians trained in anaesthesiology [3,4]. An inhospital ETI intervention allows administration of drugs that optimize the condi tions for tube insertion and minimize physiological derangement and other adverse events [4]. Unsuccessful or poorly conducted ETI can be life threatening and may result in significant complications, such as oesophageal intubation [5], hypoxemia [6], or postinduction cardiac arrest [7]. Rapid sequence induction (RSI) is generally accepted as the technique of choice for securing the airway in

© 2012 Lossius et al.; licensee BioMed Central Ltd. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.